The world should “calm down” on the possibility of new variants of COVID-19 circulating in China, leading Chinese scientist George Gao has said.
A paper by Gao and his colleagues published in the Lancet medical journal on Wednesday showed that no new variants had emerged in the initial weeks of China’s recent outbreak, after the end of its zero-COVID policy saw a large wave of cases.
“The world should completely calm down from the fear that there are new variants or special variants circulating [in China]Gao, a professor at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Reuters.
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The variants that caused infections in China were the same Omicron subvariants, BA.5.2 and BF.7, seen in other parts of the world, he said by email.
The study analyzed 413 new COVID cases in Beijing from November 14 to December 20, 2022 and found that all were likely caused by existing strains. He found that 90% of the mostly locally acquired infections were due to the above two subvariants.
The findings are representative of the entire country, the authors said, citing Beijing’s population characteristics and the circulation of highly transmissible COVID strains.
A leading Chinese scientist has advised the rest of the world to “calm down” over the new variants of COVID-19 detected in his country. (Reuters/Tingshu Wang)
China in December ended more than three years of a strict zero-COVID policy that involved city-wide lockdowns, mass testing and extensive quarantines, followed by a wave of infections among its population of 1.4 billion.
A leading government scientist said on January 21 that 80% of people had already been infected and China’s CDC has said repeatedly in the past month that continuous monitoring showed no new strains of COVID-19 have been found.
Many countries have set COVID testing requirements for Chinese travelers in the wake of their large outbreak, citing concerns that new variants could emerge and a lack of data, though China has said the measures are not warranted.
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Gao said China was continuing widespread viral genomic sequencing and would identify new variants if they emerged.
He said cases were currently declining, but “a new wave is possible in the future.”
The China-funded study in The Lancet was conducted by researchers from the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the CDC, and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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The authors said there were some limitations to the study, including China’s decision to end large-scale mandatory testing.
